Between my own local contact book in Entourage, LinkedIn, Facebook, my iPhone and three or four different email accounts that I use, I am guaranteed to never have the latest contact information for anyone in the place I need it.

Which is why I’m so looking forward to seeing Soocial get out of closed Beta. If it works, it will keep everything in sync. They even support Mac…you gotta love it.

Please send me an invite…pretty please?!?

Not exactly breaking news but I found it interesting that yet another cloud database provider has joined the mix. QuickBase has launched a developers program that promises to allow you to build Web 2.0 applications using their architecture and the Adobe Flex framework.

I’ve not really played around with Adobe Flex but they have a demo video up on the site that has tweaked my interest so if I can carve a few hours out of a weekend I may see if I can get it up and running. I am dreading trying to figure out yet another object model though.

With all the majors clamoring for developers to join their cloud initiatives (Microsoft…where are you in this game?) I’m still struggling to figure out the real angle here. I get the advantage of someone else managing all your scaling but I’m still not sure that a major site who might really have the traffic to justify a large cloud is going to be willing to give up this much control over their infrastructure. That reduces these efforts to prototyping platforms which I don’t think is a scalable vision nor the intent of Google, Amazon and Intuit.

That being said, I am very interested to see if an ecosystem of applications starts to sprout on these platforms. Now that would be very cool - have a great idea that builds on the basic building blocks of Web 2.0 (social networking, messaging, etc.)? No problem, rent or borrow someone else’s functionality and integrate it with your own. Sort of the open source model but rather than downloading source to your own servers, plug into application services that sit on the cloud. Even better if you can plug into data services to get reference data that your application requires.

Now that would be interesting….

I was on a couple of review sites today (among the list were PriceGrabber, Epinions and my3cents) to do some additional research on yesterday’s post on the long term validity of online reviews and I was a bit surprised about how poor the user experience is on these sites. I mean, some of these sites have been around since the mid 1990s and should have figured it out by now.

Specifically I tried to post reviews on all three sites and actually was unable to do so. The problems I ran into fall into a number of categories but all all killers from a user experience perspective:

1) It was not possible to sign up. Either I had registered previously and forgotten my password or the sign up process employed not only a captcha but also an email confirmation link (which in two cases never showed up). It seems to avoid bots, many sites are putting so many hoops in front of a new user that it becomes nearly impossible to register. If newly registered users are your lifeblood this is really bad! Make it easy - two clicks max with immediate feedback.

2) I could not change my public profile nickname. On one site I first registered in 2001 and sometime since then the site had adopted the user ID I created back then as my public profile nickname. When I went to change it I could not and as a result didn’t bother to post a review.

3) I entered a review and it went into the void - no confirmation, no summary and nothing in my profile. Feedback is critical to make sure that your users know you value their input and the faster the better.

With the massive number of new sites vying for attention, it is absolutely critical that your site be simple and straightforward to use and that the registration process be seamless. The review sites I looked at above failed miserably in this area.

Engage, a social network for dating by letting your friends get into the mix recently launched. TechCrunch did a better job of reviewing it than I’m likely to but I wanted to highlight the comments that are being posted as they are great. This might be one sector that social networking cannot crack.

A month or so ago I bought a new kitchen table at a major online furniture store. A couple of weeks later the item we ordered showed up by UPS freight and it was exactly what we expected. So good product, good service at the right price = happy customer.

Earlier this week I got a call from the quality assurance department at the same online retailer inquiring as to my experience ordering from their store and whether I had any suggestions as to how it might have been better. I didn’t (everything went fine) but the phone call was nice to get. Obviously they care about how their customers view them which is somewhat unique even in today’s tough market environment.

What was interesting is that they offered me $20 in cash if I was willing to leave an online review of their store on any of the major price comparison sites. They didn’t require a positive bias, just that it be an honest review and reflect my experience with them. Now, $20 = 4 expensive yet addictive Starbucks mochas so since I had only positive things to say anyway I took them up on the offer.

But it got me thinking as to the value of online reviews in general. My premise for years has been that you only get two types of online reviews - very positive ones (regardless of the score, the writers are usually satisfied) or very negative ones (where the writers have an axe to grind…often justifiably). Obviously in the above case the store was trying to influence a positive online bias as I doubt they were offering cash to customers who were dissatisfied.

So with sellers trying to game reviews and the reviews themselves being bipolar for the most part, how much value to they really add? Couple that with the fact that the more reviews that get posted on a specific item, the bigger the chance you’ll get equal negative and positive ones. My conclusion is that the summary scores for reviews (all those stars on listings) tend to be useless and that the quality of the review is entirely based on what the person wrote.

So we need a better way to extract the real meaning from all those online reviews and work out which ones are designed to game the system. I haven’t figured it out yet but if I do, watch for a startup based on the solution as there is a real need. Maybe the real value is when things turn really negative as it allows you to avoid bad products or services. So negative reviews work and positive reviews don’t.

So we need a negative review search engine…maybe www.stuffthatsucks.com? (I checked…already registered).

A few months back I was brainstorming Internet startup ideas in a bar in midtown, New York City (great bar by the way) and one of the ideas that we came up with was sort of a social network for data. The concept was a centralized database infrastructure where anyone who wanted could upload data sets that they had created to share, trade or sell. We never got far with the idea but at the time it sounded pretty cool - subject to the effects of three glasses of single malt of course.

Of course like all good ideas, there are many others out there who are thinking along the same lines. Bret Taylor, formerly of Google expressed the same desire in his blog and Read Write Web published a list of current sites that allow you to share data sets in some way.

I’ve played with a few of these sites and while they are interesting, the thing I keep coming back to is that they need to be much easier to use. I think the problem here is that most of the existing sites are built for techies by techies and as a result aren’t very user centric. It should be as easy for a university researcher with a huge, complicated data set to share it, as Joe Smith down the block who has a passion for coin collecting and has documented (with pictures) every US penny minted from 1850 to today and wants to share what he’s built.

The site that always comes to mind when I think about this topic is Geni.com. They have made a complicated data issue – geological research – really really easy. I put my direct family into the tool about six months ago on a whim and at last count my relatives have added 2000+ people to the tree with pictures, email addresses, birthdays and all sorts of data. If my aunt who can barely turn on her computer can do it then the tool has met the usability test. The other tool that comes to mind is FileMaker – creating data sets in it was brain dead simple.

What is necessary in this particular space is to make it really easy to model complex data elements. The startup that manages to do it will win and should be huge. If they also allow people to connect data sets together and pull them off to their blogs, websites, and so on then they will really win. Combine the business with either the Amazon or Google cloud computing databases and things get really interesting.

I hope someone solves this soon. I’ll be a user…I love data.

So you don’t really realize how much you rely on a device until it dies on you. This evening I finished up a call on my iPhone and put it down in my hotel room, ate some room service and Skyped with my daughter and then picked it up again. No dice…the screen wasn’t responding. After figuring out that this is somewhat common, I resigned myself to the fact that it needed to be replaced.

But of course I’m in New York City tonight, the land of the 24×7 Apple store. So with a mixture of dread and relief I jumped in a cab and 20 minutes later was walking down the steps into the main Manhattan Apple store.

For those who haven’t experienced the Genius Bar in an Apple store, conceptually it is pretty cool. You walk up to any Mac in the store and you can book an immediate appointment online and your name shows up on a big scheduling screen on the wall. They they call you and they will help you with whatever you need.

Unfortunately this was New York and when I entered in my name, the screen told me the next appointment for iPhones was 11:20pm…and it was 8:30pm (and the store was packed). Instant angry customer. So I made some noise and bugged all the “geniuses” walking by and 20 minutes later I jumped the queue and they set me up with a new iPhone. Note to self - annoying customers get serviced faster.

So it took three hours but I’m back in business. A B+ job from the folks at Apple but better than most. It would have been a A+ except for the silly three hour scheduling wait they tried to put me through. Bit of a brand issue there and they might need a few more geniuses.

I just hope this one doesn’t die. It felt like I lost a limb.

For the last year or so I’ve been attending demos and playing with websites that promise to break the connection I have with my computer (or in my case computers, I tend to collect them - nine in my house at last count). I currently derive a lot of frustration from not having all my various machines in sync - so much so that I actually do a lot of my development work over Windows Remote Desktop (from my MacBook Pro no less) to a Windows XP machine that sits on my home network behind a firewall that I get at via Cisco VPN.

I know, it sounds complicated but it actually works. I can use the exact same machine every time I want to write some code and it is always completely up to date with everything I need. Plus the large databases I normally need to access are on the local LAN so they are as fast as if I was sitting in my home office, even if I’m in an airport half way across the country waiting for yet another delayed flight.

That being said, I haven’t gone totally virtual as it just didn’t seem like it would work. Vauhini Vara at the Wall Street Journal tried it though and ran into all the problems I figured would present themselves. The article is worth a read for anyone who thinks the days of the desktop are numbered - there are a lot of problems to solve between then and now.

Boy it would be nice though.

So the big announcement yesterday was that Google is entering the hosted application space with their Google Apps Engine. So far in this space, Amazon has been generating the most press with their web services offerings and specifically S3, their hosted database server (which incidentally went down again recently).

While the blogsphere has lit up on the topic of cloud computing based on Google’s announcement, as someone who has launched an Internet based startup and would in theory be a target for these services, I continue to struggle with them conceptually as I’ve written before.

In launching TravelGator, the things we struggled with were not the things that Google or Amazon is trying to solve. Granted, perhaps once our traffic is at a level that requires resources to handle millions of users we might need some of their infinite scalability, but I’d argue at that point a company has the resources to manage their own infrastructure and actually wouldn’t necessarily want to suffer through the problems that full outsourcing can cause.

That being said, the real problems that an emerging or mid-market online company struggles with have nothing to do with large scalability. Ours included:

1. Feeds integration - we get data from lots of partners in lots of formats (some of it really dirty). It was a HUGE task to write all the code to standardize it and even to date I’ve not found a good infrastructure to handle it. Even cool tools like SnapLogic don’t seem to be able to handle complex feed integrations where the data is excessively dirty.
2. Search - OK, here is a place that Google should be able to help. The issue we ran into though is that the tools that are available for searching structured data rather than unstructured data are very difficult to get working correctly. If you want to search your site text - no problem - but try figuring out a way to take a search for “Hilton” and return “Hilton Head”, every Hilton Hotel and anything else with the word “Hilton” in it all organized and filtered by the type of data being returned. It is really difficult (and no, straight SQL doesn’t work in this case).
3. SEO - again, the folks at Google should know something about this. The dos and don’t for search engine optimization are well known but very few application stacks automate it (Ruby on Rails being one exception but as a framework it limits your flexibility in numerous other ways).
4. Front end design - this is a real killer. The libraries and tools that exist for doing true, template based website design are stuck in in 1990s. It is about time someone created a front end, WYSIWYG editor that was a powerful as PhotoShop and Illustrator and creates clean, HTML code that can be easily integrated with an application server. This is a problem worth solving as much of the cost for developing a site goes into the creation of the user interface.
5. Ad serving - much to our surprise, third party ad serving engines aren’t very sophisticated. There is an opportunity here for a innovative company to abstract away all the ad networks and affiliate networks and allow sites to properly monetize their page views. A better solution should exist and should be part of the application framework.

I could go on but these are the biggies. Databases and Python engines are all very well and good, but to really get me to jump out of my seat I’d have to see all the other services come together into true building blocks. Then I’d get really excited.

I’ve been a bit delinquent in putting up new posts lately as I’ve been distracted with some other projects but more important I’ve just not found anything that I wanted to write about. There is certainly a lot going on out there as is clear from the latest TechCrunch postings from the Next Web Conference in Amsterdam but so far I’m not seeing much in the way of new trends.

That being said, there are a couple of things that I’ve written about previously that seem to be gaining steam.

Widgets are in general, picking up steam. It seems like daily (hourly?) you hear of yet another Facebook widget or iGoogle widget that is going to change your life. No some of these are pretty cool, don’t get me wrong, but I’m beginning to wonder whether we are seeing a fundamental break between a self contained, fully functional site like WebMD that solves a specific problem and a world in which everything is a collection of much more specialized widgets that you access from lots of different channels - and ideally follow you around from channel to channel.

This is worth more thought (and postings!) in the future. I’m also waitig for a widget search engine to launch - finding all these things is a major pain today.

The other rumor I thought was particularly interesting was the one about Google launching a cloud database solution that would compete with the one started awhile back by Amazon. As I’ve written before, the key with these services is to get true generic, scalability without sacrificing the real power of the database. As every developer knows, often you need to do some funky stuff to get a database to perform which is why I’m really curious as to whether the cloud computing approach will work for the majority of web sites out there - which are the obvious target for these sort of services.

The other really challenge here is not so much getting the database up and running (and scaling), but actually designing and loading it with data. That might be the value add that really gets these services off the ground. Imagine a situation in which you could just grab a set of database components from a central library (say a list of the cities of the world) for use on your web page and someone else would keep them up to date. Now there is a service that would be worth paying for. Oh yeah, and what about loading those feeds.

More to come on this trend I predict.